Still, Slashdot doesn't have to play along with their weasel wording. For example, "ergonomic collars that deliver an electric pulse" - just say "shock collar". Don't help them whitewash what they're talking about.

Upper middle class means going on holidays twice or more a year. Lower middle class means holidays at least every 2 years.

The border collie helps round up the cattle but it would be easier if the rancher knows where the cattle are located to send out the collie. Some ranches can be hundreds of thousands of acres. And that is the main herd. If there are stragglers, they have to be located too.

Border collies generally work with sheep, cows not as much simply because cows don't really give a damn.

But sheep you have to be careful with - an entire flock in the UK had to be euthanized because they figured how to escape their fencing, and if that knowledge spread, it would basically render all farms using that fencing to keep sheep worthless. They apparently are very good at teaching fellow sheep things like that, and it was only a matter of time before the one or two that figured out how to escape taught the rest of the flock, and that flock would then teach neighboring flocks on neighboring farms and so on. It was cheaper to euthanize the flock than to have the entire country's farms re-fenced.

Wasn't there an 80186? That literally nobody built anything with? Like, it was almost a proof of concept?

The entire mission is obviously an AI fake. As acclaimed physicist Joe Rogan explained, they crew would be dead once they'd hit the Van Allen Radiation Belt (tm)

That should've been obvious by the fake globe Earth image they reportedly sent back after launching.

The earth is flat. Not a globe. The fact they had to publish this image shows the whole thing is fake.

Just today I noted that GIMP 3.2.2 (an application, not an OS) has dropped support for 32-bit x86.

This is a valid retort. But let us not think that lawyers are struggling: once they get to be a "partner" in a firm they are likely making $1 million/year. And the entire context of the discussion is that they aren't relying on staff like they used to. Back in 1980, a lawyer had staff members who ran down to the court house to get documents, bring them back, photocopy them, staple them, file them, make phone calls. Now all of that is 100% automated, plus now they have AI.

I'm not sure the legal overhead is quite what it used to be.

Disclaimers like this apply to Excel, TurboTax, GCC, ChatGPT, and more: The user is ultimately responsible for the application. The manufacturers always disclaim responsibility.

You can get companies to stand behind products and accept liability or sign a Business Associate Agreement - but you are going to have to put it in a contract and pay extra for it. This is why the product you buy at Home Depot and the one the government/military/NASA buys has a very big price difference even if it is the exact same part.

Every industry does this.

From Housing inspectors and plumbers, to software products - it is super common. I just had plumber put this into their contract for replacing a cast-iron drain with PVC. Then I had the tub reglazed and they did the same thing. There are often two prices, based on if you want a guarantee behind it or not. I paid a structural engineer to inspect the foundation of my prior to purchase. While he said the cracks were normal setting, the price was $200 for the inspection + verbal assessment, or $600 to put it in writing and stand behind it. In the last two weeks I've gotten this same thing from a tax preparer and a property attorney. Free advice from the tax preparer, but if we want him to file it and sign it there was a price. The attorney told me what to say in court, but quoted me a price to put it on his letterhead or to show up and say it.

Haha, no. Humans' collars are already here, we just keep them in our pockets and pay for them ourselves.

Nothing to see here. Just a test run of the human collars coming in ~2040. Shocking, I know.

There is nothing entertaining about enshitification.

I think you'd be hard-pressed to find a company that doesn't hide things. The difference between Anthropic and (insert company here) is only that Anthropic leaked their source code, so now we can see what they kept hidden.

Actually, many consumer gigabit Ethernet switches lack 10Mbps support these days. They are 100/1000baseT only.

Business and enterprise switches though I've found (including Cisco ones, which you can find dirt cheap used) still are 10/100/1000Mbps. Even newer business and enterprise class switches retain support.

Of course, once you step into 10Gbps Ethernet, you have to be careful because many only are 10Gbps only, while some do support 1/10Gbps. 2.5Gbps support is iffy unless it's specified which is annoying since many things have 2.5Gbps ports.

As for 486, there are still new CPUs using it. The Vortex86 has a CPU that executes 486 instructions though newer ones do support Pentium minus the FPU. These are modern chips, with IDE emulation of SD cards, Ethernet and USB support, as well as running at speeds of 800-1GHz.

And you've seen them used - any fast food restaurant with the ticket screens is powered by a mini PC using these SoCs. They do run Windows and MS-DOS, and early restaurant e-ticket systems used MS-DOS. But later ones nowadays use some form of Linux.

Developers don't have a culture of being economical with resources.

That's because in say, the 60s and 70s, computer time was expensive. It behooved you to make your code as efficient as possible - like today's cloud services, they often billed by the CPU cycle. And the run-debug cycle was on the order of a day, so you didn't want to make a stupid error because it meant your job got delayed a day at the least.

Sometime around the 80s and 90s, this flipped - human time was expensive. Computers were cheap and getting cheaper, RAM was plummeting as was hard drive space. The math started to work the other way - you don't want developers wasting time debugging code so libraries were popular - because it was more efficient (cheaper) to utilize the fact one person presents a well-debugged library that other developers could use and that means developers don't have to write that code, and they don't have to debug that code either.

That's why we have bloat - because it's cheaper that way. You could have a developer write nice and tight code, but how much are you willing to pay for it? If it takes them an extra week to make their library run 10% faster, was it work say, the $5-10,000 it cost? ($5000 a week is around $250K/year including benefits, or around $150K take home pay plus benefits, while $10,000 is $500,000K/year including benefits, or around $250,000-300,000 without benefits). Will that improvement let the company make back that investment?

You have to realize that if you want to charge $150K/year salary, spending a week optimizing costs the company $5000, so unless they can save that $5000 elsewhere (e.g., in reduced cloud compute fees, or customers will pay extra), there is no incentive to do it.

And that's really a valuable consideration. Also, compilers are really good these days. Like, really good. They will often so very strange things to save a few cycles. Some, like Clang, can be "too smart" and apply closed-form mathematical transforms to your computation (E.g., if you attempt to sum integers from 1 to n, and you do the "stupid way" with a loop, Clang will recognize it and actually generate the code to calculate n(n+1)/2 and eliminate the loop).

So it's a mix between the cost of a developer to optimize their code, the increasing intelligence of compilers to optimize code, and other things.

If you want to learn more about how compilers generate code, including being able to add in 0 cycles (hint: it uses the CPU's address calculation unit instead of the ALU to do simple addition and subtraction and even multiplication when it can, so the actual execution time is zero since the computation was done as part of operand calculation), Matt Godbolt of Compiler Explorer fame runs through a whole series in his Advant of Compiler Optimization series. (Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/playli... ). Trust me, it doesn't pay to outsmart the compiler.